Local hiring is fair to The City’s residents

Tools

As a currently unemployed union carpenter and a San Francisco resident of the Bayview district, I read with interest your Aug. 29 piece, “Local-hiring policies are economic ‘scapegoating.’”

The allegation that unions in this area use local-hire laws to discriminate against foreign nationals in economic hard times is simply false. That said, as a longtime resident and union member of this city, I am in favor of the law as applied to publicly financed projects.

Why should I pay ever higher taxes to support construction bond measures, and then compete against carpenters from all over the region, sometimes two or three hours of drive time away, because San Francisco has jobs that other cities don’t? It seems only fair that those who live here should have a certain percentage of the jobs they pay for. If we don’t take care that San Francisco residents are given opportunities to work in this city, where will the tax base come from?

Jarold HaydenSan Francisco

SF needs colorless agenda

As far as the black agenda brought up by San Francisco mayoral candidate Bevan Dufty, we shouldn’t have a black agenda or a white or a gay agenda. There should just be a “city agenda” with no color or sexual orientation attached.

Why not talk about the crime and homeless agenda? Those are two major problems affecting San Francisco and costing millions in taxpayer money. We have federal grant money in the millions given each year to The City to help various cultural and ethnic organizations with job training and business startups.

San Franciscans really need to start getting more involved when voting for the next mayor.

Ade Vlaho San Francisco

Bills won’t help business

Isn’t it just lovely that our Democratic lawmakers are proposing business-friendly bills all over the place? I suspect the outcome will be that they just establish more committees, taking another six months to finding that some regulations are hurting job growth. All this is at the expense of the little guys struggling to get by under the burden of excessive state, county and local government regulations. The only people making money out of this are on the committees.